Assistive Technology (AT) is a generic term that includes assistive, adaptive, and rehabilitative devices and the process used in selecting, locating, and using them. AT promotes greater independence for people with disabilities by enabling them to perform tasks that they were formerly unable to accomplish, or had great difficulty accomplishing, by providing enhancements to or changed methods of interacting with the technology needed to accomplish such tasks. According to disability advocates, technology, all too often, is created without regard to people with disabilities, and unnecessary barriers make new technology inaccessible to hundreds of millions. Universal accessibility (universal design) means excellent usability, particularly for people with disabilities. But, argue advocates of assistive technology, universally accessible technology also yields great rewards to any user; widely accessible design is good design, they say. The classic example of an assistive technology that has improved everyone's life is the curb cuts in the sidewalk at street crossings. While these curb cuts surely enable pedestrians with mobility impairments to cross the street, they have also aided parents with carriages and strollers, shoppers with carts, and travelers and workers with pull-type bags, not to mention bicyclists, skateboarders and inline skaters.
Previous art has disclosed portable desks such as lap desks and bed tables. These provide a generally planar rigid platform as a small portable work surface (i.e., desktop) that may be supported on legs, but in many cases the legs aren't adjustable in terms of height and/or angle relative to the plane of the desktop. As assistive technology, these desks provide not just convenience for the able bodied, but provide needed alternative placement of, for example, keyboards and mice (e.g., at a wheelchair), and/or provide support for arm(s) or upper body of those who are handicapped by back and/or muscular problems, such as Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and the like. Thus, for the latter, the desk becomes not only a work surface (desktop for items being worked on), but also a “work support” in that the desk supports both the work and, at least partially, the worker.
Particularly for the handicapped, therefore, there is a great need for adjustable desk (work support) legs to accommodate, for example, a user's height and leg/lap size; or for example, different situational placements. For example, the desk may need different leg placement when used in a wheelchair versus in a bed. For example, a painter with back and arm support problems may want to adjust the leg height according to the portion of a canvas that he/she is painting. Thus the desk/work support may need to be adjusted high or low, level or tilted in any direction, with legs angled back or forward to reach an appropriate base (e.g., angled back to the seat of a wheelchair), and so on. Furthermore, for those with disabilities, adjustments of the legs should be as simple and quick as possible, as well as not requiring much strength, mobility, or dexterity of arm, hand, or fingers.
Work support placement changes generally require adjustment of both leg length and angle, often simultaneously for a given leg, and usually front and back legs require different adjustments (assuming a typical arrangement of four legs near the corners of a rectangular desktop). In such cases, it is also common to need the same adjustment made for at least a pair of the legs (e.g., both back legs). Thus it is desirable to be able to recognize an adjustment setting made on one leg such that the setting can be readily duplicated on another leg.
Thus, it is an object of the present invention to provide adjustable work support legs that accommodate the limitations imposed upon people with disabilities, particularly relating to the back and/or muscles, while simultaneously providing superior convenience for the able bodied.
More particularly, it is an object to provide individual leg adjusters that can be operated by one hand with minimal requirements of strength, dexterity, and movement range (mobility). It is a further object to enable simultaneous adjustment of both length and angle for a leg, and for the adjustment to be restricted to discrete angle and length (longitudinal) adjustment steps that provide easily controlled, recognizable and duplicatable leg positioning.